Bob Ostertag Annotated Musical Biography Born April 19, 1957 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. 1972-5: high school in Ft. Collins, Colorado. Vaguely wanting to be an orchestra conductor, he learns a different instrument every year (flute, violin, percussion), but mostly plays electric guitar. He forms an ensemble to perform his compositions, with 2 electronically modified trumpets, oboe, English horn, piano, trap set, percussion, electric bass and electric guitar. The group rehearses for 2 years but there is nowhere in suburban Colorado for them to play. 1976: begins a contentious stay at the Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music, where he drops the guitar and instead builds a Serge modular synthesizer which becomes his main ax. He forms the Fall Mountain ensemble with Ned Rothenberg (reeds) and Jim Katzin (violin). 1978-9: Ostertag leaves Oberlin for good to tour Europe with Anthony Braxton's Creative Music Orchestra. Twenty years later, the Orchestra's concert in Köln is released as a 2-cd set on hat ART, Creative Orchestra (Köln) 1978. Following the tour, he settles in New York City's Lower East Side and joins the scene of young, unknown musicians including John Zorn, Eugene Chadbourne, and Wayne Horwitz, as well as Fred Frith, who had just moved to NYC from London. His work is immediately singled out by Michael Shore writing in the Soho Weekly News, soon joined by Robert Palmer in the New York Times and Gregory Sandow at the Village Voice. Robert Fripp of King Crimson also becomes a public fan. With electronics and synthesizers in general, the way most people sue them seems very shallow to me. Its a waste of a potentially incredible device. The only guy I've seen recently on synthesizer who interests me is the young guy Bob Ostertag. -- Robert Fripp in the Soho Weekly News, 1979 Bob Ostertag is currently New York's leading exponent of free-form synthesizer. He's developed a sharp mistrust of capitalist commodity-think: 'I don't want a grant! Where's that money come from, Rockefeller or someone? Where'd HE get it? I don't want his money. He didn't get it from experimental musicians, he shouldn't give it to them. Why doesn't he get some garbage men to clean up these streets' -- he gestures outside his Mott Street storefront -- instead of giving it to people nobody's ever gonna to hear anyway?' Ostertag doesn't seem to mind that hi himself is an experimental musician nobody's ever gonna hear anyway, and that he damns himself in that bargain: "That's true, but I like it better that way. The music I make, with Fall Mountain, Fred Frith, Eugene Chadbourne, John Zorn, is HONEST music. It's a pure social, political, economic, and sonic statement of who we are and where we're at. It's all right there. -- Soho Weekly News,October 18, 1979 Fall Mountain releases an LP,Early Fall, on Eugene Chadbourne's tiny Parachute label. But Ostertag also spends an increasing amount of time as an organizer in the movement to shut down nuclear power plants being built on the eastern coast, in Long Island, NY and Seabrook, New Hampshire. He is arrested several times, and organizes an anti-nuclear benefit concert with John Cage, Fred Frith and himself. 1980: Ostertag releases his first LP under his own name, Getting A Head, with Fred Frith and Charles K. Noyes on Frith's Rift mini-label. The record features Ostertag playing an instrument/invention created by himself and Bryan Medwed, consisting of 3 modified open-reel tape recorders linked together with helium balloons. The record marks one of the first, and to this day one of the only, times that tape manipulation techniques developed by the first generation of electronic composers for use in the studio were adapted for liver performance and improvisation. One Side one of Getting A Head, the sounds move in short, almost breathless little impulses, always lively and alert. You know that Frith and Ostertag are listening to each other with strong, even crazed concentration (sometimes with manic glee too), never just fooling around or digging deeper ruts. Side Two is peaceful. The search for new sounds moves much more slowly, evolving in long, supple arcs made of smaller, more weirdly twisted parts; and in between there's enough time between the beginning of one event and the end of the next to enjoy some curiosity about what might be coming next. The high, insistently lyrical final episode is especially lovely. -- Gregory Sandow, Village Voice, January 7, 1981 Despite the label's near total lack of resources and distribution, over the next year the LP brings the first international attention to Ostertag's work. Although common in many areas of contemporary music, complex tape systems are rarely used in improvised music. This new development represents an exciting possibility, with American Bob Ostertag's work being the latest in a short list. At its most intense, it assumes the proportions of electronic music, yet there are no synthesizer controls in site. Cascades of splintered guitar notes form the basis of a hyperactive and concentrated duet, both Frith Page: 1 and ostertag drawing from an inexhaustible supply of musical and technical ideas. -- City Limits (London) November 5, 1981 True we have a tape loop here, but don't confuse this with Robert Fripp's small, intelligent, mobile unit. There are a lot more surprises here, and there is a vital interaction between the people running the decks and playing the instruments. Also, sides one and two are radically different, lacking the sameness of Fripp's work and adding a good deal more 'hazard.' The result is a worthwhile balance of beautiful sounds and sensitive noise. -- OP Magazine, 1981 Getting A Head is musical kissin' cousins with Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Ostertag uses a "highly unstable and peculiar recording system" which uses kiddie balloons to hold up tape loops between tape recorders that are made to malfunction in an assortment of ways, and another dimension is added when the home listener changes turntable speeds. But at 33, 45 or even 78, you will still be able to hear a pained cow fly through a time warp. -- unidentified British music magazine, 1981 Following the release of Getting A Head, Ostertag becomes the first of his generation of musicians to have his work presented at The Kitchen, at the time NYC's premiere venue for new music. Bob Ostertag's improvisations on various non-keyboard synthesizers are about as far removed from the electronic music clichés of the past as can be imagined. Much synthesizer music still sounds like an imitation of something else -- conventional instruments, natural or machine sounds, and so on. But the sounds that go into Mr. Ostertag's music, while they can be exceptionally elusive, seem indigenous to the idiom in which he is working. They do tend to be sounds rather than pitched melodies, but what comes out is unquestionably music, a shifting, dappled patchwork of sounds that combine in clusters, circle each other in a kind of wary counterpoint and develop into other sounds in a disciplined manner. There were moments that faintly suggested birds, moments that suggested warfare, and indescribable overlays that each seemed to carry a specific emotional weight. An exceptional performance. -- New York Times, January 27, 1980 Ostertag also performs in the Zoo Festival, a week-long improvisation extravaganza at Giorgio Gromelski's Zoo Theater organed by Chadbourne and Zorn and featuring almost every one of the young musicians of the emerging downtown NYC scene. The festival is timed to coincide with, and in reality in opposition to, the well-heeled New Music, New York Festival at the Kitchen. Though the New Music, New York Festival (which later metamorphosized into New Music America) was supposed to showcase all the new music in NYC, not one of the raucous musical upstarts from the East Village was invited to participate. The Zoo Festival's final "big band" concert featured Zorn's first large ensemble game composition, Archery, and Eugene Chadbourne's The English Channel, which was then released as an LP on the Parachute mini-label run by Chadbourne and Zorn. Chadbourne's composition is based on zany juxtapositions of brief fragments of musical styles, pioneering a compositional direction later popularized by Zorn With the "New Music, New York" series happening at the Kitchen, it is important to note the existence of another experimental music scene. I'm referring to the wild rebel underbelly of "free" musicians which includes Eugene Chadbourne, John Zorn, and Bob Ostertag. This is one scene that is below the underground, without even as much established recognition as the established school represented at the Kitchen. In the past few weeks, solo, duo, trio, and other recitals have been given by most of the local practitioners of this art, as well as a few imported from other areas of the world. There were duets between guitarist Chadbourne and reed man Zorn, the former rubbing balloons against his strings, the latter placing a miniature football in the bell of his alto sax. Bob Ostertag crouched over a forest of tangled wires and produced finely controlled, indescribable sounds, and interfaced a radio with his synthesizer to stunning effect. Two week later, brilliant Britisher Fred Frith joined them. This music is in a whole new realm. These guys aren't just peering into the doorway of the unknown: they've taken a flying leap into the Black Hole. DEVO described their first album as 'The important sound of things falling apart.' Ha! They don't even know the half of it.